April 2003

WS-Security: New Technologies Help You Make Your Web Services More Secure

Without good security, Web Services will never reach their potential. WS-Security and its associated technologies, the focus of this article, represent the future of security for Web Services. Provided here is an overview of these emerging security standards that explains what they do, how they work, and how they get along together. Topics discussed include integrity and confidentiality and how these are provided by public key cryptography, WS-Security, and more. Some of the key components of WS-Security, such as the wsu namespace, are also covered. David Chappell

Visual Studio .NET: Building Windows Forms Controls and Components with Rich Design-Time Features

Visual Studio .NET provides support for designing rich features into your controls and components, allowing you to set properties, set form placement, inherit from base classes, and much more. So how does Visual Studio .NET do all this? What does the Windows Forms designer do? What's the difference between a control and a component? How does Visual Studio integrate your controls so that they can access features of the .NET Framework?In this article, the authors answer these common questions by building a clock control and taking the reader along for the ride. In building the control, hosts and containers are illustrated, the property browser is explained, debugging is discussed, and a general overview of the design-time infrastructure is presented. Michael Weinhardt and Chris Sells

ASP.NET: Nine Options for Managing Persistent User State in Your ASP.NET Application

ASP.NET provides many different ways to persist data between user requests. You can use the Application object, cookies, hidden fields, the Session or Cache objects, and lots of other methods. Deciding when to use each of these can sometimes be difficult. This article will introduce the aforementioned techniques and present some guidelines on when to use them. Although many of these techniques existed in classic ASP, best practices for when to use them have changed with the introduction of the .NET Framework. To persist data in ASP.NET, you'll have to adjust what you learned previously about handling state in ASP. Steven Smith

ADO.NET: Tackle Data Concurrency Exceptions Using the DataSet Object

ADO.NET provides many techniques for improving the performance of data-intensive applications and for making them easier to build. The DataSet, the hallmark of the ADO.NET object model, serves as a miniature, disconnected facsimile of a data source. While using the DataSet improves performance by reducing expensive trips to the database server, it also introduces the possibility of multiple users attempting to change the same data simultaneously, thereby generating data concurrency exceptions. This article examines the common causes behind data concurrency exceptions and presents techniques for overcoming them. David Burgett

Advanced T-SQL: Automate the Generation of Stored Procedures for Your Database

Design-time automation makes coding faster and ensures that all the procedures generated use the same naming conventions and structure. In an effort to improve their coding efficiency in a large SQL project, the authors wrote a set of design-time stored procedures that generate run-time stored procedures, and have used them in project after project ever since. Recently, the authors updated their procedures to make use of SQL Server 2000 features, including user-defined functions. This article covers the creation and execution of these dynamic T-SQL scripts to automate the coding of common database stored procedures. Peter W. DeBetta and J. Byer Hill

Data Access: Implement a Data Access Layer for Your App with ADO.NET

Implementing data access functionality is a core activity of most developers working with the .NET Framework, and the data access layers they build are an essential part of their applications. This article outlines five ideas to consider when building a data access layer with Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework. The tips include taking advantage of object-oriented techniques and the .NET Framework infrastructure by using base classes, making classes easily inheritable by following guidelines, and carefully examining your needs before deciding on a presentation method and external interface. Dan Fox

(842 KB)

Columns